Major changes are needed to the House-passed budget resolution, including language to make President Donald Trump's 2017 tax cuts permanent, according to Senate Republicans.
"It's complicated. It's hard. Nothing about this is going to be easy," Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., commented, according to The Hill on Thursday. "There are some things that we need to work with the House package to expand upon."
House Republicans, with a push from Trump, passed a budget blueprint Tuesday. The budget is aimed at delivering what the president calls his "big, beautiful bill" that will allow $4.5 trillion in tax breaks and $2 trillion in cuts to spending.
Their counterparts in the Senate, however, are not only calling to make the tax cuts permanent but also seeking deep cuts to Medicaid to fund the House's plans.
Trump has also vowed that he will not touch entitlement programs such as Medicaid, Medicare, or Social Security, but has not ruled out cutting spending through eliminating waste and fraud.
Republicans in the Senate want to pass large parts of Trump's agenda through budget reconciliation, which allows them to bypass a Senate filibuster.
The Senate earlier this month moved its own budget resolution, but the House vote Tuesday returned action to the Senate's side.
Thune and other top Republicans have said that making Trump's tax cuts permanent is their priority. The House budget resolution extends the cuts but caps them at $4.5 trillion and not enough to make them permanent.
"Now, the work starts over here," Senate Finance Committee Chair Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, told reporters Wednesday. "I haven't developed a topline [for taxes] yet. We're going to start working on what we need to do."
But now that the Senate has the numbers for cuts the House included, "we'll start working on our adjustments," he added.
One way to make the tax cuts would be to treat them as a policy continuation, meaning they would not need to be offset by matching spending cuts.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., commented that he hopes Congress can use the maneuver and said, "We're not introducing new law, we're extending the existing law, and by definition, that's what current policy means."
Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Wednesday that the House budget falls short, and rejected the House's tax framework.
Graham also told reporters Tuesday, before the House vote, that the Senate will have to do a "major overhaul" on the House's budget plan.
Republicans have also acknowledged that the House's plan to cut $880 billion in savings to healthcare can't happen without making reductions in Medicaid spending, a plan that many Senate Republicans reject.
"I'm not going to vote for Medicaid cuts," Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., commented, adding that more than 20% of people in his state either use Medicaid or Children's Health Insurance Program benefits.
"It'll need to be changed," he said. "I know there's a lot of people on our side who want a bunch of changes."
Senate Republicans also discussed the budget Wednesday during their luncheon, with the White House's chief of staff, Susie Wiles, attending.
Hawley said that Thune told members that he does not think the House's budget plan will get the "job done."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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